Not just GPU-based acceleration: the partnerships announced on occasion of this year’s GTC event demonstrate that Nvidia software, too, is a key technology in several existing or upcoming EDA tools
EDA and engineering software received quite a bit of attention at the recent Nvidia GTC event, with “rockstar” CEO Jensen Huang mentioning this theme during his two-hour long keynote, and with some of the major vendors (namely Ansys, Cadence, Siemens – the German parent company, not Mentor – and Synopsys) issuing GTC-related press releases to announce their extended collaboration with Nvidia. While partnerships between Nvidia and EDA vendors are not new, this level of emphasis from both sides seems unprecedented and deserves a closer look.
The announcements issued by EDA and engineering software vendors highlight three main areas of collaboration with Nvidia: GPU-based acceleration; Omniverse-based visualization; and the use of AI development tools encompassed by the Nvidia “AI Foundry” offering. A fourth area, the only one specifically related to the EDA flow, is optical proximity correction based on Nvidia cuLitho.
Software acceleration based on Nvidia GPUs
In GTC-related announcements, the use of Nvidia GPUs for software acceleration was highlighted by Ansys, Cadence and Synopsys. Ansys harnesses Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs to boost multiple simulation solutions, and prioritizes the new Nvidia Blackwell-based processors and Nvidia Grace Hopper for products across its portfolio – including Ansys Fluent, Ansys LS-Dyna, and its electronics and semiconductor products. As for Cadence, previously announced collaborations with Nvidia include the GPU-optimized Fidelity CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software and the Millennium Enterprise Multiphysics Platform, a hardware box for the acceleration of CFD simulations based on Nvidia GPUs. Synopsys is applying Nvidia accelerated compute architectures, including the GH200 Grace Hopper, across its full EDA stack spanning design, verification, simulation and manufacturing. The tool list includes Synopsys VCS, Synopsys Fusion Compiler, Synopsys PrimeSim, Synopsys Proteus (see below).
